The origin of the term is unclear, but it was used as early as 1949 by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his book The Vital Center to describe Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, and in 1954 by Leonard Levy in a book review published in The Western Political Quarterly. The modern use of the term as a self-identifier dates from Southern Partisan magazine in 1988. The modern neo-Confederate movement got a boost with the publication of the 1991 book The South Was Right by James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy. That book used the occasion of the breakup of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia as an excuse to assert that the time had come for the Southern states to once again secede, arguing that the South was culturally and historically a separate people from the North. The South Was Right is also filled with "slaves-didn't-have-it-so-bad" arguments alongside blaming Northerners for the slave trade, the use of Yankee, Scalawag, and Carpetbagger as insults on almost every page, and claims that Southern people are of primarily Celtic ancestry while Yankees are primarily Anglo. The latter is not exactly true: in the early European settlement of North America, the Celtic peoples (Scots, Scots-Irish, and Welsh) settled in Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region - the latter of which was a stronghold of pro-Union sentiment during the Civil War - not to mention later migrations of Irish Catholics to the Northern industrial cities, while coastal Virginia and Deep South were primarily Anglo.[1]

The League of the South is one of the most visible neo-Confederate organizations, founded in 1994. In 1999 members of the League of the South formed the Southern Party, a minor political party with a Southern nationalist/secessionist platform which ran candidates in the 2000 elections but disbanded in 2003 due to internal squabbling, although a few state chapters remain.

Despite or because of their antipathy for Yankees, many Neo-Confederates vocally and, on their websites, blogs and messageboards, vociferously support the small group spawned by the Mississippi born creator of Second Vermont Republic, Thomas H. Naylor. During an hour long interview on his Holocaust denying, neo-Confederate Internet radio program, The Political Cesspool, for Confederate History Month, League of the South leader and author of Racism Schmasism, James Edwards said that Naylor was "obviously a good Confederate."[2] Naylor and SVR are a topics of frequent discussion on a messageboard of ex-klansman Don Black. [3] Kirkpatrick Sale[4], a co-founder of SVR and current delegate to the neo-Confederate Southern National Congress delusionally spoke of his friend Naylor's "successful" efforts and his frequently proposed plan for a confederation of states from a secessionist New England and the Maritime Provinces of Canada, [5]

“” "The people in Vermont, who have been very successful in their secession efforts, talk about a New England secession, which might make sense. They could form an alliance with certain of the coastal provinces of Canada. That might make a viable kind of nation.

In 2007, shortly after the Vermont Secession blog revealed the SVR ties to numerous neo-Confederates [6] like Thomas DiLorenzo and LOS board of director member Franklin Sanders who served on the SVR advisory board, controversy broke in the Vermont blogosphere over the disclosure concerning one board member, Donald Livingston, who headed up the neo-Confederate Abbeville Insitute, so named for the plantation of the mid-19th century slavery advocate, James C. Calhoun, and where Naylor serves as an "associate scholar." [7] Livingston had been the first director of the League of the South's Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History, as well an adjunct faculty member at the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama. [8] Then co-chair of SVR and managing editor of the now defunct companion journal of SVR, Vermont Commons, Champlain College professor Rob Williams, responding to questions about racists from the League of the South and specifically about VTCommons contributor Livingston said,

“” "Is (Livingston) a racist? I don't know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level." [9]

Neo-Confederates believe and promote the Lost Cause of the South mythos. They tend to be racists and Dominionists and there is some degree of overlap with Christian Identity. They believe that the south has a primarily Christian and European background (usually "Anglo-Celtic") and should take steps to preserve this. While their literature is silent about the issue of Jim Crow and they claim that they do not want to reinstate slavery, it is a pretty safe bet that being a black person in a new Confederacy would not be a comfortable life. It should be noted that the reason that the Confederacy existed in the first place was due to slavery, but these people deny it.

↑ For an accurate and much better overview than the not even wrong history one will find in The South Was Right, see Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer on Celtic and Anglo migration patterns and cultural influence, Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart on the culture specifically of the ancestrally Celtic peoples in the southern U.S. and how it differs from the Anglo Deep South, and finally Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War by David Williams to demolish any lingering myths that the Southern people were ever united behind the Confederacy in the first place.

↑ Yes, the same Kirkpatrick Sale who wrote the definitive history of Students for a Democratic Society. An example of someone who has gone so far to the left - specifically in his case Luddism - into making common cause with the far right on shared "decentralist" grounds.